[en] Nowadays, shipyards are making huge effort to efficiently manage equipments and resources such as laborers, gantry cranes, transporters, steel and block stock yards, etc. Previously scheduling was manually performed by an experienced manager of a shipyard. But such a scenario leads to undesirably long times for producing scheduling results. In addition, the quality of the scheduling results was usually not optimal.
To improve the overall process, Discrete Event Simulations (DES) have been developed and recently use in shipbuilding industry. The use of simulation-based design and virtual reality technologies leads to higher efficiency in terms of work strategy planning, and offers, as a result, significant productivity gains. It gives computer-supported answers to the major questions: when and where to produce what and with which resources depending on the availability and restrictions of resources and materials.
The first part of the paper presents a multi-criteria analysis to select the most appropriate DES software for shipyards. Then, the second part of the paper shows production simulation model focusing on block erection stage. Two different blocks splitting are compared and then the results are discussed.